All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show is Colleen Rowley.
She's a former FBI agent, lawyer, and whistleblower, and was a Democratic Farmer Labor Party candidate for Congress in Minnesota's second congressional district.
She's a whistleblower advocate and civil liberties activist, part of the Stop Torturing Bradley Manning campaign.
And of course, was chosen by Time magazine as one of their Persons of the Year in 2002 for her whistleblowing in the Moussaoui case.
And if I remember right, Colleen, you gave some good advice back then about not invading Iraq, because that would be really good for these terrorist guys if we were to do that.
Yeah, and I've got more to follow up.
I actually spoke out about eight months after that first whistleblower memo, because the FBI director had invited my opinion.
And he was standing silently, as was George Tenet, as Dick Cheney made his famous lie about the connection between Iraq and 9-11.
And both of those directors would stand there silently while he would lie like that.
And I spoke out at the end of February.
I wrote, actually, another memo to the director.
So it's one of these terrible things that we've had to witness, all of these stupid wars that have made us less secure, all of the crazy, massive data collection of non-relevant information that people are led to believe makes them more secure.
Torturing innocent people somehow makes them more secure.
And I'm really thankful that you have this program in order to get this information out to more people.
As people understand what's going on, I think they start to wake up and become more activists.
Yeah, well, you know, the disparity.
We've been talking about this with numerous guests over the past couple of few weeks, I think, in particular, this issue of the disparity between what's obviously the truth and what's obviously right versus the narrative on TV and the policies of our politicians, and obviously in both parties, as the madness continues on.
And it seems like at some point, there's kind of a breaking point for everyone where they realize, come on now, I think maybe the critics have been on to something.
I need to start paying attention here.
I mean, especially when the rubber really meets the road, high prices because of all the paper money that it takes to pay for all this empire.
You know, I mean, people start asking, why is it that I can't afford to drive to work, you know?
Well, you know, it's funny that you called today because our second district congressman, who I actually ran against in 2006, his name is John Klein.
And the reason I ran is he was this strong proponent of war.
And not only the first wars, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was very much supportive of those and behind them, but he's just generally in favor.
He's a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who carried the nuclear football.
And so he believes that war is the way to dominate and all this.
And here's the funny thing.
And this morning, he held a town hall here locally in our district, which he rarely does.
He doesn't like to meet with constituents, but he held a, it was in a public library about an hour away.
So I traveled down to it.
And most of it was on the budget and how the country is going bankrupt.
And now we will have to have shared, quote unquote, shared sacrifice, which he has a chart showing in red, Medicare costs and all the rest, and how all the people will have to sacrifice to pay for this terrible debt that he actually, five terms in, he's been involved in tripling the national debt.
So of course, I did get one comment out, but the one thing that is, I think, the key fact, if people are listening, that they need to understand is war is sold on the premise that it's helping the security and making the United States stronger, et cetera.
Robert Pape, a professor in Chicago who is the expert, you need to have him on if you haven't so far yet.
Is he- Oh yeah, I've interviewed him over and over since the first book came out back in 05.
You know, he's of course renowned now as the expert on suicide terrorism.
And of course makes the point that the suicide terrorists are reacting to occupation, military occupations of their country.
But there's another point that he's made that I don't think really gets enough play, which is that over the course of these wars, the United States has lost the percentage of world wealth.
We used to have, in about 2002, the United States had 31% of the world's wealth.
And Pape equates this to power.
This is actually equatable with the US power in the world.
So if you went back to 2002, we were 31% of the world's power and wealth.
Well, there's this new Pentagon report that's saying that very thing today.
I don't know if you saw- No, I didn't.
Farid Zachariah is reporting it.
It's a Navy guy and a Marine guy.
So maybe it's just their vested interest.
But they're saying that, you know, all these army bases occupying the world is a big waste.
And what we really need to do is have a strong economy.
I think, you know what, I think they have been influenced by Robert Pape's writing because Robert Pape has preceded them, but he also has lectured in the Pentagon.
So obviously he's getting more and more people to pay attention to what he's saying.
But Pape says we've gone from 31 down to 21 in the last nine years or so.
And so if you look at losing one third of your power and your wealth, you know, are these wars even working?
I mean, most of the liberals object to the wars based on moral and legal grounds, but the conservative should object to these wars based purely on pragmatic grounds that even if the purported purpose of the war is to dominate the world and become more powerful, et cetera, we've lost a third of our power in the last nine, 10 years of these wars.
That's an incredible thing.
And I don't think hardly anyone recognizes that.
And the thing is too, is even if you're for world empire and you think America must lead the collective security of the world through the UN and all of those things, whether without the UN, all of those things, secure the seas and whatever, still, you know, as David Vine reported in his book, Island of Shame, the plan is at least from one Air Force perspective to run the whole world from Guam and Diego Garcia.
We don't need a lily pad base network all across Central Asia provoking all this, you know, resentment against us and wasting all this money.
We can threaten to bomb anyone in the world.
Hell, Obama wants to put conventional explosives on the end of three stage intercontinental ballistic missiles so that he can kill anybody within half an hour.
I mean, you can be all the world empire in the world.
You got a death star.
Why do you need a base on the ground?
Well, you know, the obtrusiveness, I guess, and the apparent obtrusiveness of the United States bases, these seven, 800 bases around the world, the occupations in the Mideast are the real reason why we have the resentment.
And on top of all of this, now our actual wealth and power is even declining.
So it seems to me like we could not be helping the so-called terrorists better than what we're doing now.
And you got military people, I think, like these two guys now, they had to write that paper, though, in their personal capacity, even though they're on the Joint Chiefs of Staff or whatever.
I believe so.
Let me click on it here.
Actually, you have it here.
It's from the Wilson Center.
Yeah, it was, you know, a private project in that sense.
Right, but they are, I think what it is is they actually probably are representative of a majority opinion in the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
It's just that the other ones are afraid to go on paper with this.
So these two guys did it in their personal capacity.
Yeah, well, and I don't know how important it is, but it seemed to me it means something that it was the Marines and the Navy saying, all we need is boats full of Marines, and we don't need the Army to do all this stuff, you know?
Right, and it's probably why- I'm so cynical at this point, you know.
Well, you know, Robert Gates had that quote two weeks before Obama launched the last war when he said, you would have to be insane to ever send another land army.
And I think that probably his quote is reflective of this knowledge now that the United States is losing its wealth and power by doing what they're doing.
Well, and you know, the whole thing, and this goes in a lot of ways, and geez, we're almost up against the break here, but I remember reading my friend, now my friend, Will Grigg, in the New American Magazine after September 11th, and he had studied left-wing radical terrorism all over the world for years and whatever, and he said, look, the thing is with terrorism is the action is in the reaction.
By definition, you're talking about a very weak player against a very powerful one, and so the whole game is to try to get you to act stupid and to overdo it, to blow yourself up, to bankrupt yourself fighting, to alienate your own citizenry by clamping down on their liberties, which is what we'll get back to after this break, and it just seems to me like the Americans fell for Bin Laden's script perfectly, Bush and Cheney and them, you know?
Yep.
Sad state of affairs.
We'll be right back with Colleen Rowley, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
On the line is Colleen Rowley, former FBI agent, lawyer, whistleblower, and we're talking about the bad reaction in the war on terrorism, the overplayed hand, its consequences for the rise of terrorism in the world, and I guess I worked in a little jab there about Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan before him, all the paper money they created to pay for all these wars that we're paying the cost of now, and then, of course, is the subject that's most important, which I'm so happy to see is being written about by you, Colleen, in the Washington Times, of all places, let the Patriot Act die.
Rowley and Legere, is that how you say his name?
Well, in French, it's Legere.
I don't know if he uses the French pronunciation, though.
Legere, yeah, well, I'm an ignorant Texan.
What do I know?
Colleen Rowley and Philip Legere in the Washington Times let the Patriot Act die.
Well, what's so bad about the Patriot Act?
Well, this article, of course, we only had 700 words or so to work with, and so I didn't get everything in there, but there's 160-some different provisions in the Patriot Act, and the majority of these provisions actually are actually not controversial.
There's a lot of them that actually haven't even been used.
There are some that never made sense.
It was passed so quickly, and they threw in the kitchen sink.
So there are actually provisions in the Patriot Act that have never made sense and have never even been used.
I think one of the three provisions that is up for reauthorization at the end of May is actually one like that.
It's the lone wolf provision, which means that you don't have to show a connection to a foreign terrorist organization.
I'm not sure that that one has even ever been used.
It's just kind of a non-useful thing.
There are lots of them like that in there, but there are only three of the 160-some that are up for reauthorization, and so this title, Let the Patriot Act Die, of course, is inaccurate, because actually that was the title that the Washington Times gave it.
It wasn't ours, because even if the three provisions were not authorized, there would be 160-some more that still exist.
And actually, in the 160-some are the most problematic ones.
The definition of material support to terrorism that allows the FBI now to infiltrate advocacy groups on the chance that someone could be, would be, if given all the tools and the inspiration to become a terrorist.
So this is the kind of actions that the definition has led to.
I'd be for it if they would use it against the Republicans and the Democrats.
Infiltrating the parties, yeah, that's, well, I guess we, as citizens, we can all, actually, and we should be informing ourselves by attending some of these meetings of the party partisans who work out these backroom deals, if you can get yourself into the backroom there.
In any event, we wrote this article because we thought at least because these three provisions are expiring, it would give us an avenue to talk about the great alternative that Feingold, Senator Feingold proposed, of course, before he was forced out and didn't win his reelection, called the Justice Act.
If you remember, Feingold is actually the only senator who even read the Patriot Act and voted against it before it passed, and all those years, he had a chance to really look at what are the problems with it, and it isn't the whole entire thing.
Like I said, a lot of these provisions were not controversial, and some of them were not even used, they were kind of senseless.
But there are a few provisions in the Patriot Act that are truly problematic, and so then he made his alternative, which is the Justice Act.
So we thought it would be a great vehicle now to talk about the real fixes that are needed to the Patriot Act.
Yeah, well, so tell me a little bit about these administrative subpoenas and national security letters and administrative warrants and all these things.
I don't know exactly all the distinctions.
I know some of these things existed before the Patriot Act to a certain extent, but it sounds to me like basically federal cops can just write themselves warrants for whatever they want.
Well, you know- Like there's a general warrant on all Americans that's already been issued, and now it's just signing in the particulars.
The targeting of advocacy groups now inside the United States and the targeting of Americans by intercepting their telephone calls and their emails actually were accomplished outside of the Patriot Act.
What most people think of as shorthand for what you just said, which is all of this illegal monitoring and infiltration and basically gathering private information, non-relevant.
I should always add this is non-relevant information because it's without a scintilla of evidence.
They launch these massive data collections without having probable cause or even suspicion.
And there's a lot of things that cause that, this green light to massive data collection.
The Patriot Act is just one little part of it, but what people often confuse too are the national security letters provision in the Patriot Act with this provision that's expiring called the court order.
And it's a section 215 court order.
So the one that's expiring, which is the section 215 court order that everybody back when it first passed, they thought the FBI was going to libraries and using these section 215 court orders.
That was actually more of a red herring because the other way that the FBI was getting information was through national security letters.
Why?
Because it was even easier than getting the court order.
And it's all but because there has been a green light put on and the crazy theory that says the more information you collect, we'll put it into these giant computers and somehow we'll develop a program that can sort through 1.7 billion pieces of data being collected every 24 hours.
This is, I think, the NSA mostly, but that's the number.
1.7 billion pieces of data is collected every 24 hours.
And of course, by definition, it's irrelevant.
It's non-relevant data.
Well, and I mean, that's really the thing about the Patriot Act too, right?
Is the Patriot Act is sort of the stand-in for the post-Patriot Act revolution, right?
It was the benchmark that said, ah, forget the Bill of Rights.
Now we can do what we want.
And then there's a million of them after that.
Right, and a lot of it was done illegally.
The good thing about this Justice Act, for instance, is it would go back and take away that immunity given to the telecommunications companies for going along with Bush's illegal order.
So that's actually a wonderful fix because that was accomplished.
It wasn't through the Patriot Act.
Bush couldn't even be bothered to go through the legislature, even though he might've been able to sell some of this.
He couldn't even be bothered.
He did a lot of this just totally illegally.
And then because there's been impunity, there's been immunity to the telecommunications companies for what they did illegally here, which is gathering information with no level of evidence or probable cause on ordinary Americans.
And as I just said, 1.7 billion pieces of data collected every 24 hours.
Now it goes into these computers.
I think the NSA's computer, at least one of them is called Black Widow, aptly named Black Widow.
And then there's a hope that eventually they will come up with some kind of computer program that will spit out who is the terrorist.
And of course, this is the part that's not true.
This is, it's never been able to, no scientist has been able to develop such a computer program.
Boy, they're so lazy.
Reminds me of Bush when he appointed that general to be the war czar.
Cause he's like, man, I'm tired of even talking about this anymore.
Make Hadley and this other guy do it or something.
You know, the cops really just want to turn over all police work to Hal to tell them which way to go and what to do, who to go and trap.
It's like, and you can tell from the results, the way that people who are marginally guilty of something keep getting convicted on these terrorism charges since September 11th here.
Yeah, it's an unworkable system.
Absolutely.
Hey, if I asked you to, if you were like in charge and I said, I don't know, you were the majority leader of the Senate or whatever, let's just repeal the Homeland Security Act and abolish that thing and spin all those agencies off or abolish them.
Would you be for that?
I'm definitely in favor of massive reform of this total information awareness system that we have of this massive data collection.
And it's not a hard reform.
We just go back to the law.
The law actually had developed in a way and it included exceptions.
Bush would always say, we have to do this to catch the terrorists.
The law already included exceptions, for instance, to avoid a Miranda warnings if it's a life and death situation.
It already included exceptions for something called the sneak and peek.
It's a terrible name for it, but all it means is that you delay the notice to the people.
I mean, those things already were included in the law.
Hey, they got a gigantic anti-terrorism law passed just in 96 after the Oklahoma City bombing.
I mean, part of our judiciary is that it's not because it's necessarily a nice ethical way of doing things.
It's because it worked.
And what it did is it went for accuracy.
If you have Guantanamo and 150 people are totally innocent, I don't care if you waterboard those 150 people or even the other 380 people who are low level Taliban foot soldiers, you can do all of the harsh interrogation tactics and stress positions and waterboarding.
You are not going to get intelligence from those innocent people.
And we're doing the exact same thing by importing non-relevant information into these computers.
And as you mentioned, the police and law enforcement are just as happy because they collect salaries.
They don't really care what the end result is.
They get points for inputting the subpoenas and detentions and all the rest.
Right.
I'm sorry, Colleen, we're over time and I got to leave it here.
But I really appreciate your time.
I'm so sorry to interrupt, but I hope I can have you back on the show soon.
Sounds good.
Thanks so much.
All right, everybody, that's Colleen Rowley, FBI whistleblower.
The new one in the Washington Times is Let the Patriot Act Die, at least major parts of it.
And of course, she writes for The Huffington Post and all over the place.
Read what she's written.
It's good.
It'll help make you smart.
We'll be right back.
